“Don’t be so darned smart.” She sat down on the bench that was there. “This — all this — has gone to my legs. I can’t stand up. It stimulates me like cocktails on an empty stomach. I suppose when I go to bed, if I go to bed at all, I’ll be crushed and I’ll lie and stare at the dark and be miserable, and I may even throw up, but now it just makes my legs weak and excites my brain. I have got a brain.”
“So has a cricket.” I sat beside her. “You remind me of a cricket.”
“That might interest me some day, but it doesn’t now. Andy was disagreeing with me, and of course Celia was on his side. Heavens, are they hooked! Andy says that the family is in danger, in horrible danger, and that we ought to stick together and trust no one.”
“Whereas you’re in favor of trusting? Who, me?”
“Not trust exactly. Trust doesn’t enter into it that I can see. I was merely going to tell you something that happened this afternoon.”
“I must warn you, Miss Dunn, that after that confession of yours I’ll suspect anything you say. I doubt if I’ll even take the trouble to check up on it.”
She made an unladylike noise. “Nobody’s asking you to check up on it. Only it happened, and I’m going to tell you. I told dad, and I don’t think he even heard me. I told Mr. Prescott, and he said, ‘Yes, yes,’ and patted me on the shoulder. I told Andy and Celia, and I swear to heaven they think I made it up. Why the dickens would I make it up that somebody stole my camera?”
“Oh. Is that what happened?”
“Yes, and whoever it was took two rolls of film too. You see, we came down to New York from the country Wednesday morning. Dad had to go back to Washington, but the famous Hawthorne girls decided the rest of us should camp in this house until after the funeral, and Aunt Daisy said all right.” She shivered. “Doesn’t that veil give you the creeps?”
I said it did.